When doing research, you'll likely come across different types of information. Today we'll look at some of the characteristics of the different kinds of information that you can access through the library and on the web. Today we're going to look for books and articles using the library's ProQuest database.
ProQuest is the library's largest database – used mostly for finding scholarly information, usually published in scholarly journals. But you can use ProQuest to find all kinds of information, including books, videos, and different types of articles from scholarly journals, newspapers, and magazines.
To access ProQuest, you'll first need to go to the library's website. You can get there through MyPath, or go to the college's website: madisonville.kctcs.edu. Go to "Quick Links" at the top, then "Current Students."
From Current Students, go to "Library."
Now that you're at the library's website, go down to the "Research Databases" tile.
From this page, ProQuest is the first link on there. Be sure to log in with your KCTCS username and password if prompted.
ProQuest is actually a collection of different databases, which is why it says you're searching 6 different ones. One of the databases is an Ebook collection called ProQuest Ebook Central, and one is a streaming video collection called Academic Video Online. If you wanted to search specifically for books or for videos, you can click the tab above the search box for "books" or for "videos & audio." The main database in ProQuest is ProQuest Central, which is a massive database for finding articles from newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. You're probably better off searching the whole thing, so make sure the tab above the search box is set to "All," and make sure the checkbox below the search box is set to "full text."
Today we're going to search for information on students with disabilities. We'll start out by searching for information on children with disabilities. I'm going to type those three words into the search box and hit search and we'll be taken to our search results.
Searching children with disabilities turns up 2.1 million results. Because today, we're looking at the characteristics of different types of information, the first thing we'll do is filter our results by source type. Over on the left side, you can select which type of resource you want to see in your search results. So let's start out with books. Click on "Books" under source type to filter your results to books.
The main thing to remember about books is that they are much, much longer than an article. So usually an article has a couple of key messages, or ideas, that they're trying to get across. A book usually has many ideas, and goes into depth on most of those ideas. So, books are sometimes a little too detailed. The other thing to remember about books is that the author is usually an expert at what they are writing about, and they have to do a lot of research to write a book. So the information in books is somewhat more accurate or valid than maybe something out of a short article or a website.
So three things: Depth--books are long. Authority--the author is an expert, and content--usually pretty accurate.
Also, fewer books get published each year than articles. News articles are published every single day, for example, whereas a book takes time to write, and so there are fewer of them.
Because of this, it's not always easy to find a book on a specific subject. For example, we might not be able to find a book that's been written about disabled nursing students. You can find thousands of articles about disabled nursing students, but no books about it in our book collection.
So let's take a look at this book here about recreation for children with disabilities, just as an example. You can click on the title.
And then click "Read Online" on the left.
Once the book loads, you can look at the table of contents on the left side, or search within the book. Typing in “wheelchair,” for example, shows you each page in this book where that word occurs.
You can click down here to expand that, and it will take you to that page.
At the top, you can access your MLA citation by clicking on the speech bubble icon.
Copy and paste the citation into your Works Cited page.
Let's go back to our search results and see what else we can find. Let's clear the filter for "books." Click the X for books under your Applied Filters.
Now, let's do a more detailed search to find information specifically about disability rights. You can do a more detailed search by putting quotation marks around words you want to treat as a phrase -- words that go together. So I'm going to type "disability rights" in quotation marks. You can also combine different phrases together with the word AND. So, I'm going to type "disability rights" in quotation marks, AND "education". Now it will search for information about disability rights, but more specifically, how disability rights are treated within education.
Let's see if we can find a video about disability rights. Right now the search results are showing all types of information. We'll filter our source type -- this time, to audio and video. Under source type, click "Audio & Video Works."
It looks like there are a couple of interesting documentaries about disability rights. Let's click on this short video about Judy Heumann: "The Mother of ADA."
So you can get information from a documentary that sometimes you can't get from an article. This video provides a brief overview of the life of disability rights advocate, Judy Heumann--the first schoolteacher in New York City using a wheelchair. So sometimes videos will be a good resource for when you're doing research.
To get an idea of what the video is about, you can scroll down to the Abstract, which is a summary of the video.
When you play the video, you can turn captions on, and there is also a transcript on the right side of the video, which you can search. Below the video is your citation. You do have to cite a video in your paper the same way you would cite a print resource.
Here is the MLA citation for the video.
So to summarize, you can use ProQuest to find books and videos. But mostly, you're going to want to use ProQuest to find articles. So let's take a quick break, and then in the next video we'll look at finding articles.